Subject: READDIR reply description

From: "Noveck, Dave" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 13:29:03 -0700

I can't figure out from the description in the spec what the
response to READDIR is supposed to look like over the wire.

The description of enry4 and dirlist both contain items 
which look like C pointers (begin with *) and I'm not 
sure how these are supposed to be interpreted.  Clearly,
pointers are not being sent over the wire, but what is
the response actually supposed to look like?

The other point about READDIR is it is very unclear
how your supposed to calculate the amount of space to
include in dircount.  Is it equal the total length
minus the sum of all the fattr4's, but including XDR
overhead?  For maxcount, XDR is explicitly included,
but not dircount, so this is hard to understand.  If XDR
overhead is not be included, what exactly should be
excluded (e.g. byte count fields, roundup to four-byte
boundaries, etc.).  From the rest of the description, it
appears that somebody has a particular implementation
of VOP_READDIR in mind, but this isn't good anough
for those not using VOP_READDIR or using one that is
slightly different.